Good old times are finally back!

Remember all the good deals you could do back in 1999 and 2000? Tech companies went crazy in their attempts to buy new customers and market share in order to raise more venture capital.

Well, it seems like good times are back again. The WiFi network company FON, funded by Google and Skype among others, today launched a campaign selling 1 million WiFi routers for $5 each, instead of the regular market price of $60.

FON’s idea is to build a global WiFi network on the same principles as music sharing networks such Napster or Kazaa – what FON calls user generated infrastructure. All users, called FONeros, that are willing to share their WiFi networks at home can also access other FON-user’s networks for free when traveling. Non-sharing users and non-FONeros, also called Aliens, will be able to buy access for $3 per day.

But in order to make this happen, the user generated infrastructure obviously need a little push…

Another company that doesn’t want to wait for new customers is Skype. In order to speed up the user growth Skype recently launched an offer, telling U.S. customers they can now call any landline or mobile phone in the U.S. until the end of the year. Skype has already passed 100 million registered users, but this doesn’t seem to be enough when competing with other voice over Internet-companies. So last week, Skype also started offering one hour of free calling to countries all over the world for new customers.

Of course I’m still waiting for my favorite Web 1.0 offer to come back. It was back in 1999. I was offered a free week of vacation with hotel and airline tickets paid. All I had to do was to trade the e-mail addresses of 10-20 friends.

And yes, the trip was great — but the company went belly-up a few months later.